Rally Navigator is a new, simple way to create Rally routes and print roadbooks.

Using the power of Google Earth and your GPS, you can create, print, and share a Dakar-style roadbook.

As usual we were hoping for more progress, but have run out of time as Dave (GSNorCal) is headed off to Peru for the Dakar Rally tomorrow (Wish I was going with him!!!). That said, it looks pretty good!

I would like to get 5-10 new users testing the program, get some feedback, make updates and then let another additional group of users take a test drive.

If you want full access to create and print roadbooks, please email me mike@rallynavigator.com (No PM's I need your email to send an invite)

I would appreciate all constructive feedback as we continue to develop this project.

Sorry for the cross post - If I violated the ADVRider code of ethics - Feel free to NUKE.

Based on your feedback we have already made improvements to Rally Navigator.

Just today we made programming updates to speed loading time and also improve the function of the rotating "Loading" icon, you will also see in the roadbook header a Status Bar with a readout of the track points as they load from the library. This lets you know things are progressing and not "Frozen" as some have reported.

Rally Navigator can run much more quickly on Firefox with the following configuration changes (which we strongly recommend).

This speed test issues a number of Google Earth plugin API calls for every frame drawn. The number of frames per second is a measure on how fast this is done. On a decent computer you should get 20 - 50 fps.
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Speed things up 5 times or more...

If you are using Chrome or Firefox 4 or newer you should read this!!!

The Google Earth plugin needs to communicate with the Javascript code that runs in the browser. This means that there are two processes that need to talk to each other. This is called "Inter Process Communication" IPC for short. Browser makers have tried to make the browser more robust by treating the IPC calls with more care. That is very nice of them but someone forgot to consider the performance penalty.

Applications on Planetinaction.com typically make thousands of calls per second to the Google Earth plugin. If each of those calls takes a tiny amount longer you immediately suffer massive performance penalties. These can be in the order of 5 - 10 times slower that they should be.

Fortunately in Firefox you can turn of the IPC protection to the plugin. If you type "about:config" into your address bar, you'll get to a page with a lot of settings. Find the line for "dom.ipc.plugins.enabled = true" and toggle it to "false". Restart your browser and things should run much better.​

I have had my personal computer set like this for months with no ill effects.

My Speed Test Results after the IPC configuration change:

Google Earth plugin version:6.2.2.6613
Average FPS over the recorded 10 seconds is: 61.65

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While we are working to streamline Rally Navigator interaction with Google Earth this is a great improvement.